Types of psychologist

There are two main types of academic psychologist:

1. Nervous system psychologists
2. Gene psychologists

Both measure behaviour, but the former use these measurement to assess the functioning of the nervous system, and the latter is interested in the heritability of behaviours.

Of course, both kinds of psychologist can work together and those interested in evolutionary matters form a third, overarching kind that recognizes the complementarity of these two broad fields.

Not all academic psychologists will agree with this typology.  For example, some will point to work more firmly rooted in the social, rather than behavioural and biological sciences.  This work is interested in political level accounts, and explanations that rely upon beliefs, desires and so forth. Clearly intentional states will have some relation to the nervous system, but some will prefer to locate causality in psychological processes, intentionally described, rather than nervous systems.  There is rather a large literature on just how to think about that and my personal preference is to take a fairly instrumentalist line on intentional accounts, in much the way that Dennett has outlined in numerous publications: they capture real patterns, but those patterns can, in principle, be reduced.

Some folk argue for potent social causation, such that human interaction through language can lead to the emergence of new behaviours and cultural objects.  They tend to be referred to a social constructionists, and I have discussed the reduction of this view in a paper in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (2004, 34 (4), 333-352).

I had cause to relate this typology in a lecture last week.  The lecture was an overview of genetics and evolution for second year undergraduates taking a psychobiology module.  At one point a bold student asked me what any of this had to do with psychology.  It was a good question to ask, as I am fairly sure a number of the students were wondering the same thing.  So, I discussed this view of the topic and reinforced it with a common mantra of mine: psychology is a branch of biology.

I have always seen behaviour as the core focus of psychology - what is it for and how is it produced?  The fact that organisms move about, interact with their ecology, and one another (their social ecology) strikes me as profoundly biological.  By this I mean that the phenomenological experience of watching behaviour is equivalent to peering down a microscope and gazing upon the complex machinery found on a mosquito larva.

A mosquito larva in a water droplet.

Intellectually my position is that behaviour is a manifestation of the machinery, designed (by evolution) to calibrate organisms to their local circumstances across various timescales.  Which is not to say that all behaviours are adaptations, but those which are not are likely to be a downstream consequence of those that are.  This description also captures the digestive system and the hormonal regulation of heart rate...

But my personal experience and position is not one that I hold in common with the majority of the undergraduate population.  For them humans are the central focus, and psychology refers to the inner workings of the mind - or the brain for those interested in cognitive neuroscience.  Somewhat traditionally it appears that students begin their academic journey with their own introspection and seek models that will capture that experience of thinking and doing.

This is laudable - it is the beginning of the scientific instinct in many cases - but I cannot help but wonder what their view would be like if they were exposed to more observational work across a variety of behaving taxa.  I certainly introduce students to this, on field trips, and in turn observe an explosion of new questions and methodological considerations that enhances their subsequent work.  But these students are already well into a psychology degree, and are self-selecting.  What I should like to see is the very first experiences of students being those of watching and wondering - as one of my favourite text books exhorts at the very beginning.

Of course, this is an empirical question to some extent, and the benefits of engaging in natural history may well extend further than my lecture hall.